


The Fire and the Flood

by Fallowsthorn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Abstract, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-25
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-16 03:34:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/857301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallowsthorn/pseuds/Fallowsthorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They can both take people apart and put them back together again, but the ways in which they do so are very different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fire and the Flood

They are two halves of a whirlwind, a thunderstorm, a lightning strike, an eruption of molten earth. They take people and they break them, snap minds and twist bones and pinch nerves, and then they soothe the wound with the same voices that made it, and a new man staggers away when they are done. They do not mean it - no one has told them, for fear that they would slip a bit and harness between the teeth of that power. If they meant it, they could change the city, the country, the world. As it is, they change only the people living there. They are a bolt of pure electricity, but lightning only ever means to strike the ground; people are merely in its way.

The Detective, he destroys. He rips people apart along the seams and unseals their secrets and reads their lives in their walk and their speech and the glint in their eyes as they lie and he does not think to put them back together, because that is not what he is looking for in them. He is deadly, and all the more dangerous because he does not care about those he hurts. He can study a leaf for hours with single-minded intensity, and see only traceries of veins between skin, so he turns to men and sees only the same. He cannot comprehend what others think of him, of them, of the world, only the facts of it, and so what runs through his limbs and eyes and tongue is not blood but skyfire, and his touch turns hearts to ash.

The Healer, he destroys, too. Where one man is lightning, the other is rain, cleansing fire and cleansing flood. He is the one to reweave the seams and seal the dam against the words and lies and truth and silence and he is the one to give new blood and new life and a new way of glancing through the layers of the world, because he does not know what else to give, or that he should give anything less. His destruction is of a different kind, a healing destruction, because he obliterates not the man that is, but the man that was. The Detective breaks the man that was into shards, but the Healer sweeps them away, all but the unshatterable core, and builds the man that is around it.

They are Athena's children, goddess of Wisdom and War, and they breathe and dance and laugh and whirl, and they would not notice if the world crumbled around them, unless its waters poured over their heads and the earth took them as it own and swallowed them whole. They are beautiful in their own right, the twins of destruction, the fire and the flood. And you do not fail them. Because then they will focus their ire on you, and the Healer will do nothing to help you, but he will do nothing to help the Detective, either, and that makes it all the worse. They hold each other's reins, keep each other in check, the one always tempering the other's blade.

And the Healer can rip, and the Detective can save, but it is not their natures to do so, and so they stay in the balance of the vacuum they have created. And yet it is not a vacuum, not a true one, because the outside world intrudes and forces them into roles not their own, fire drowning and flood searing, branding, and so the inferno learns to flow like script on parchment and the water learns to burn like acid ice.

They are two halves of a whole, of an ocean, of a sun, of the skin-between-veins of a leaf, and all they touch burns and hisses and used to die but now is made bright and shining and new. So do us all a favor, reader, and tell anyone you can about this, about that undeniable fact, but never tell the Healer and the Detective, because one would be awed and the other would dismiss it, but they would know, and they would try to guide the dance they've been walking since long before they met, and there are only two ways that could come out. Either they will falter in the steps, unsure anymore of where to place their feet, or they will master the dance of twining fire and flood, and with who and what they are, either course could run ill. But no one knows what the future's hand will hold, and fortune's face is a mask when she deals. So perhaps, in the time of things, the dancers will be shown the pattern, and the dance – for all of them, the earth and the rain and the wind, not just the fire and the flood – the dance will become bright and shining at their touch and the whirl of hands and eyes and feet.

And the fire and the flood will temper all blades, not just their own, and the flood will melt copper and the fire will run red. And they will laugh, jubilant, maelstrom laughter, and break down those that hear it, and set them free.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on the Sherlock Kink Meme, here: http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/4777.html?thread=14988969#t14988969
> 
> In short, it was "[Sherlock and John] can both take people apart and put them back together.... Run with it, anons!"
> 
> And boy do I love Chrome's built-in spellchecker.


End file.
